Slashdot Mirror


User: Appolonius+of+Perge

Appolonius+of+Perge's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
16
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 16

  1. Re:Chrome vs IE on Chrome Beats Internet Explorer On Any Given Sunday · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Firefox nightly has a very fast pdf reader built in, so if you wait long enough it will make it to the ESR.

  2. Re:Won't degrade well in the landfill? on A Paper Alloy To Replace Plastic Cases · · Score: 5, Informative

    Methane is generated by anaerobic processes. You wouldn't pump air in to generate methane; you'd just collect it as it built up as bacteria turned solid and liquid waste into the gas.

  3. Re:No way. on Ask Slashdot: GNU/Linux Laptops? · · Score: 1

    I had a similar experience. My laptop wouldn't suspend or hibernate, and their response was just "huh, that's odd." Then they stopped replying to email.

    I've had better luck with their desktops. I needed a new desktop for my grandmother *now* and didn't want to get her a windows one, and she loves the one we got from them.

  4. Re:That cannot logically be true on Modern Humans Bred With Evolutionary Predecessors In Africa · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The definition of species isn't very good. It's a convenient abstraction, and works in a lot of cases, but it doesn't entirely reflect reality. There are, for example, ring species that break it, and lots of fertile hybrids between species, and even hybrids between genera, especially in plants. Often, hybrids are not fertile, but sometimes they are. But it's important to remember that fertility isn't the only barrier to inter-species mating; behavioral, temporal and geographic barriers also play a very important part.

  5. Re:Russia approves? on Russia Approves Siberia-Alaska Railway · · Score: 1

    As a fraction of our GDP, we are less in debt than we were after WWII. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Us_debt for more details.

  6. Re:Yawn on Internet-Based Political Party Opens Doors · · Score: 2
    This absolutely is a problem with the US voting system. In first-past-the-post voting like we have, you have to make all these horrible strategic voting choices, and third parties can damage the people they would otherwise partially support.

    There are lots of other voting systems that would reduce this problem. My favorite is approval voting for its simplicity and good qualities, but lots of other methods would be leagues ahead of what we use today, from Instant Runoff, to the suite of Condorcet methods to range voting.

    There was a bill in NH in January to introduce approval voting (the motivation was probably to strengthen tea party candidates without hurting republicans), but it was voted "inexpedient to legislate," which a brief investigation tells me means "not going to be brought to the floor."

  7. Record Label Owned By Sony on Weird Al Says "Twitter Saved My Album" · · Score: 3, Informative
    For what it's worth, the record label that published this, http://www.jiverecords.com/ is, according to Wikipedia, owned by Sony: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jive_records.

    This may or may not affect your purchasing decision.

  8. Re:Not sure I understand this argument at all on Patent 5,893,120 Reduced To Pure Math · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Nobody is arguing against protecting a specific implementation of an algorithm (although copyright already provides this protection).

    The problem is that when you patent an algorithm, you don't just patent that expression of that idea, like you do with a book or a power drill. You patent all the expressions of that idea. It would be like writing a book on some topic, and then owning the rights to all books on that topic until the patent runs out. You own a whole chunk of the language, every possible expression of you idea, not just the particular one you came up with.

    Likewise, when you patent an algorithm, you have patented an entire (admittedly fairly confined) branch of mathematics, having to do with expressions of that algorithm. This is distasteful, and, as the current software patent climate has shown, has terrible chilling effects on the software industry as a whole.

  9. Re:First Post on Chinese Censors Crack Down on Time Travel · · Score: 1

    (Mandarin) Chinese actually has a pretty restricted set of sounds, IMO (I speak it), but the raw consonants cover a lot of what English has, although it lacks a "th" or a "v" sound. Most of the awkwardness comes from the fact that it has a very restricted set of valid syllables, with no final consonants other than "ng," which makes it really hard for native Chinese speakers to pronounce western words with final consonants, and particularly consonant clusters. "Stockholm" is rendered as si-de-ge-er-mo in an attempt to cover all the consonants (and mapping er to ol because there's no final l).

  10. Re:Uh, crony capitalism != capitalism on RIAA Lobbyist Becomes Federal Judge, Rules On File-Sharing Cases · · Score: 1

    True conservatives want the crony capitalism cut off

    True liberals want this too. In fact, I don't think you'll find anybody not paid to think otherwise who claims crony capitalism is a good thing.

  11. Re:Google's arsenal of programming language people on Java Creator James Gosling Hired At Google · · Score: 1

    Brian Kernighan (K&R C, AWK) also spends summers working at Google NYC.

  12. Re:Please start from the beginning on Third Blast At Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant · · Score: 1

    Perhaps, but remember that the first reactors at this site came online over 40 years ago, so it's possible they just didn't have the foresight. Everything costs something, and, frankly, this is a pretty reasonable failure mode for what amounts to a nearly direct hit by both one of the strongest earthquakes ever _and_ a tsunami.

  13. Re:Please start from the beginning on Third Blast At Japan's Fukushima Nuclear Plant · · Score: 1

    The way I understand it, they did immediately lower all of the control rods, but there is still enough energy released internal to the fuel rods to produce power at about 6% of capacity, which then drops off over the course of a few days, even when the control rods are lowered, which stops rod to rod reactions. Ordinarily, it is simple to cool away this much heat, but with the coolant pumps dead, they have these problems.

  14. Re:And... on Anonymous Leaks Internal Bank of America Emails · · Score: 1

    My grandmother _does_ use Linux, you insensitive clod!

  15. Re:Not a Steiner tree on Ants Build Cheapest Networks · · Score: 1

    The article goes on to say that they seemed to add trails that improved the robustness of the networks as time went on. So the implication is that they build the minimum first, and then add robustness as resources become available.

  16. Re:I disapprove of Approval Voting on New Hampshire Bill Could Lead To Adoption of Approval Voting · · Score: 1

    Actually, Arrow's Impossiblity Theorem only applies to ranked-preference voting systems. Approval voting (and it's generalization, range voting, where you give points over [0,1] rather than just the endpoints) gets around this by allowing voters to be more expressive than simple rankings. Look at the statements that the theorem covers, and let's consider range voting over [0,1] (approval voting is an approximation to this that works when n is large): Non-dictatorship, unrestricted domain, and non-imposition are obvious. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives: Clearly, if voters assign candidate A n points and B m points, then adding a candidate C, with voters own preferences for them, does not change the points assigned to A or B. Pareto Efficiency: If everybody prefers A to B, they will assign A more points than B, so clearly A will have more total points and be preferred. Range voting, and, by extension, approval voting, satisfies all the terms of Arrow's theorem because it gets more information from the voter than a preference ranking.